13 comments:

A great episode of RFED (my favorite of the 2)! Our table has some mild version of all of those types, but as you said, every role player has a bit of one or more of those.

I actually think you guys missed a very annoying player type, the Goody-Two-Shoes/Lawful Stupid- a lawful good character, usually a cleric or paladin, who objects to the party doing anything not strictly good, tries to do diplomacy with obviously evil enemies, keeps complaining about the party rogue, lecturing to NPCs, et cetera.

I can think of other annoying player types, but most others aren't as bad as those you presented.

I have to say I believe it a little ridiculous you'd scrutinise the actor, Isn't more fun and rewarding as a DM when your players are so invested in your campaign that they LOVE to play the character so in-depth ?

The idea here is that these people are only bad if it interferes with the logical direction the game is supposed to take. For instance, let's say I'm playing a loner character at the start of a campaign. As soon as the inciting event thathat is supposed to bring the party together is done, as an actor I'd logically go my separate way, which runs counter to the entire point of d&d.

I feel like you missed a low-hanging joke about how every DM's world is perfect until they introduce PCs into it, and the game would run much more smoothly without players. That would have crystallised the tongue-in-cheek tone for everyone watching, I think.

Being one (or more) of these types is not, in itself, a problem. It's only when they overdo it and make it difficult to play the game when it becomes a problem. For example, we have a player in our campaign who has a 7 pages background, but she doesn't expect others to read it nor does she ramble on and on about it.

I had a player my last campaign who had a 15 page backstory. I had him summarize it to me because I was not going to read it. He's an excellent roleplayer and after realizing (on his own) that some of his characters actions didn't support a good group dynamic he read up on good teamwork in dnd and I have never had a problem with him since. His current character has a backstory he didn't even write down. I ramble. My point is that sometimes it can be good and sometimes it can be bad. The best thing to do is to self examine and determine whether it is beneficial or detrimental and if it is the latter then fix it

Funny, I wrote an article in a similar fashion over on The Mage College, except mine was how to reign these players into cohesiveness with the game.

I also included the Fighter (dice in hand ready to fight), the Mogul (the player that will destroy your world's economy), and the "Roleplayer" (the player that, similar to the actor, fill moments with the utter minutia of the world and how their character interacts with them, i.e what they eat, collecting art objects, wanting long character interactions)